Online social networking emerges as an important part of people's social life and meanwhile, it has generated huge amount of valuable social data. Most of the online social activities are performed via the social network service (website/smart phone apps). A social networking service is a platform to build social networks or social relations among people who, for example, share interests, activities, backgrounds, or other connections. A social network service comprises the representation of each user (such as the profile), the social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web-based and provide means for users to interact over the Internet, such as e-mail, instant messaging and the like. The online community services are considered sometimes as a social network service, although online community services are group-orientated. Social networking service allows users to share ideas, pictures, posts, activities, events, and interests with people in their respective network. During these activities, many valuable social data have been generated.
The social networking services make it possible to connect people who share interests and activities across political, economic, and geographic borders; and the generated data are very informative and valuable for both individuals and businesses. However, so far the generated huge quality social data have not been fully and effectively exploited. With appropriate collection, sorting and analysis; such social information will be greatly helpful in a wide variety areas of people's life and work. On the other hand, via the collecting, sorting and analysis, a lot of potential valuable business information could be obtained from the social data. In view of these huge potentials, the accumulated social data could be a goldmine waiting for the exploration by those visionaries. Through such data mining, companies are able to improve their sales and profitability or expand their clientele basis.
Social network service, represented by Facebook and Twitter, becomes a significant part of many people's life. Each day, a huge amount of information has been generated on these social networks via user posting and so on. Furthermore, there are very valuable and useful information, such as tread or popularity, hidden in such huge amount of postings. Such valuable information is highly desirable for many businesses or organizations. However, due to the huge quantity and great diversity of such social network information, it is critical for developing certain approaches to analyze and present it in an effective way.
On the other hand, following the emergence of iPhone and other smart phones, people are increasingly using handheld devices, such as smart phone and tablet device other than the traditional PC, and in particular, via the applications (apps) installed in such handheld device to visit the social networks.
As for the utilization of social data, one of the key issues is to find the appropriate attribute whereby those sorting and analysis could be performed. Currently, the forefront of emerging trends in social networking sites is the concept of “real-time” and “location-based”. Real-time allows users to contribute contents, which is then broadcast, as it is being uploaded, on anywhere relevant online. The concept is analogous to live radio and television broadcasts. One major social network website, Twitter, set the trend for “real-time” services, wherein users can broadcast to the world what they are doing, or what is on their minds within the 140 characters limit. While Twitter focuses on words, Clixtr, another real-time service, focuses on group photo sharing wherein users can update their photo streams with photos while at an event. Facebook, however, remains the largest photo sharing site. It has been estimated that Facebook has about 100 billion photos by 2012. On the other hand, more people and business have increasingly realized that concerning their values and importance, not all of the social data are equal. For most people, the social data at or close to their living or working locations are the ones have the most interest, importance, and value for them. Therefore, concerning the aforementioned appropriate attribute, the location feature would be one of the most suitable attributes for sorting, organization and analysis of social data. Moreover, other features associated with the social data, such as certain time period or time interval could also be very useful in some circumstances.
Concerning the accumulated social data, a large portion of these social data actually already have certain particular feature(s) or attribute(s) embedded in the content of that social data. Such embedding may take a variety of different forms. The social data might have trending hash-tags, mentions, pictures, videos and so on. Many social data have embedded location information in them. Utilizing these existing attribute tags would be an easy yet effectively approach to mining and then present the collected social data. These organized social data can help people reshape their social life and play a big role for marketing, security and so on, especially with the analysis of the combination of location, hash-tags, mentions, pictures, videos, and other social attributes. However, currently there is no a good solution to analyze the social data with embedded location and visualize it on the map in real-time.
Accordingly, one objective of the present invention is to provide an effective method to process the collected real-time social data based on certain specific attribute of the social data and then present the processed social data on a geographic map (social map) based on that particular attribute, such as a particular location. Moreover, in a more convenient and natural manner, these social data on the social map are arranged in various tiers, i.e., tiles at different levels.